In the quantum world, cause doesn’t always come before effect
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Quantum batteries could charge more efficiently by skirting conventional rules of causality.
Yuanbo Chen at the University of Tokyo and his colleagues analysed whether a particularly counterintuitive quantum phenomenon could play a role in powering quantum batteries – energy storage devices that could harness quantum effects.
In the classical world, causality goes in just one direction: if event A causes event B, then it is clear that B did not also cause A. But at the quantum scale, Chen says that it …